Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson and children became the most famous image of the Great Depression in the United States. Its one of the classic photographs of the 20th century, and is now an icon of resiliance in the face of adversity. --- From Wikipedia

One of the most famous images in the upcoming Pulitzer exhibition at the Haggin will be the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi during World War II. Ironically, the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, had been rejected as a military photographer by the Army and Navy due to impaired eyesight. It was while serving as a combat photographer for the Associated Press that he was sent to the small Pacific island of Iwo Jima.

On February 23, 1945, Rosenthal was only part way up the mountain when the Marines raised a small American flag to celebrate the capture of Mount Suribachi, a volcano on the island’s southern end. By the time he reached the top, they had decided to substitute a larger flag that could be seen all over the island. It was this moment that Rosenthal captured.
“Out of the corner of my eye ... I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene.”

This year (2005) marks the 60th anniversary of this photograph that captured a brief moment of glory in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Over 6,800 American troops were killed, including three of the marines in the photograph. Rosenthal’s image endures as a memorial to their sacrifice.

Alfred Eisenstaedt worked as a photographer for Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. He is most renowned for his candid photographs, most of which he made using a 35mm Leica M3 rangefinder camera. His most famous photograph is of an American sailor kissing a young woman on V-J Day in Times Square in 1945. (The young woman is widely accepted to have been Edith Shain, although some sources say she was Greta Friedman; the sailor was identified by the Naval War College in August 2005 as George Mendonsa, of Newport, Rhode Island, although many other men have claimed the honor.) A sculpture was made, based on the photo, by artist J. Seward Johnson. Entitled "Unconditional Surrender," it was unveiled on August 11, 2005 and will be moved to a gallery after a four-day display in Times Square.[1]

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon is a photograph taken by Eddie Adams on February 1, 1968 showing South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. The event was also captured by NBC News film cameras, but the Adams' image remains the defining image.

The photo won Adams the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, though he was later said to have regretted the impact it had. The image became an anti-war icon. Concerning General Nguyen and his famous photograph, Eddie Adams later wrote in Time:

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths...What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"
"How do you know you wouldn't have pulled the trigger yourself?" Adams asked.
Eddie Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the damage it did to his reputation. When General Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a hero of a just cause.

Sharbat Gula (born c. 1972) is an Afghan woman of Pashtun ethnicity. Her face became famous as a cover photograph on a 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Gula was orphaned during the Soviet Union's bombing of Afghanistan. While at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984, her picture was taken by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was approximately 12 years old at the time.

Although her name was not known, her picture, titled "Afghan Girl," appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine. The image of her face, with a red scarf draped loosely over her head and with her piercing green eyes staring directly into the camera, became a symbol both of the 1980s Afghan conflict and of the refugee situation worldwide. The image itself was named as "the most recognized photograph" in the history of the magazine.

March 1993 Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine crises Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2]
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note on the fate of the girl. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

Susan wrote:
March 1993 Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine crises Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:
"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2]
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note on the fate of the girl. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.
He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

VIETNAM — The 10-year-old South Vietnamese soldier in this 1968 photo was known as "little tiger" for allegedly having killed his mother and teacher, two Viet Cong members.
PHOTO: Philip Jones Griffiths

On June 8, 1972 a South Vietnamese aircraft accidentally dropped its napalm payload on the village of Trang Bang. With her clothes on fire, 9 year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc ran out of the village with her family to be airlifted to hospital.